Customize, extend and reuse outdated hydrogeological software

Each scientist is specialisted in his or her field of research, site of research and in the tools he or she uses during the research. Then, he or she is the most suitable person to improve the used tools by overcoming their limitations and for achieving faster and higher quality analysis. However, most scientists are not software developers. This determines the need to provide them with an easy approach that allows non-software developers to improve and customize their tools. This paper presents an approach to easily improve and customize any hydrogeological software. It is the result of the experiences collected from updating several interdisciplinary case studies. The main insights of this approach have been illustrated by four examples: MIX (FORTRAN-based), BrineMIX (C++ based), EasyQuim and EasyBal (both spreadsheets based). The improved software has been proved as a better tool able to perform an enhanced analysis by considerably reducing the time and the tedious input and output data files processing.